Decision Aiding,Not Dispute Resolution: Creating Insights through Structured Environmental Decisions

Public participation in environmental decisions has become commonplace. A favored model for public input is to use the tools of dispute resolution to seek consensus among members of a multi‐party stakeholder group. The authors believe that a focus on dispute resolution and consensus building can pose impediments to the creation of insights for decisionmakers and lead to the adoption of inferior policy choices. Instead, they advocate an alternative approach to stakeholder participation characterized as “decision aiding” through a structured process based on constructive, multi‐attribute techniques and value‐focused thinking. In this paper some of the major difficulties posed by a dispute‐resolution approach are articulated, the principles of a decision‐aiding process reviewed, and this alternative approach illustrated by describing a stakeholder consultation involving water‐use planning for a hydroelectric facility on the Alouette River in British Columbia, Canada. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Uniformity as response to soft law: Evidence from compliance and non‐compliance with the Dutch corporate governance code

The objective of the paper is to examine how firms have dealt with the trade‐off between flexibility and uncertainty that is characteristic for the decision‐making of firms in coping with self‐regulatory initiatives in general and the comply‐or‐explain principle in corporate governance in particular. Using unique data for 126 listed Dutch firms, we find that firms respond to this self‐regulatory initiative by largely complying with the code recommendation, possibly out of fear that the firm's reputation may be damaged. Furthermore, we find evidence suggesting that firms confine themselves to adopting a specific set of code recommendations and use similar arguments to explain non‐compliance. Our findings indicate uniformity in adopting the standard of good governance which is not in line with the logic of corporate governance codes and casts doubt on the effectiveness of this form of soft law. Overall, the paper's findings indicate that more restrictive (regulatory) instruments may be necessary to make firms conform to the spirit of codes.     

Meta‐Governance of Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Actors' Perspectives from Kenya

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development promotes multi‐stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) as a means of implementation while at the same time putting renewed focus on the need for national‐level ownership and implementation. Despite the fact that an ever growing body of literature on the merits and drawbacks of MSPs delineates several success conditions for partnerships, efforts to translate this knowledge into national‐level meta‐governance for MSPs remain marginal to date. This study outlines the benefits the literature alleges for such “meta‐governance” frameworks, before it uses a country‐level study with a series of stakeholder interviews to take a closer look at national‐level context conditions and lessons learned with regard to two water partnerships in Kenya. Our findings suggest that to date the existing meta‐governance for partnerships in Kenya is rather weak and fragmented. Yet respondents support the view that MSPs could benefit from such a framework, in particular regarding local ownership of MSPs and the potential to scale successful cases. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Implementing Program Budgeting in the Serbian Ministry of Defense

The Republic of Serbia's Ministry of Defense (MoD) is attempting to implement a program‐oriented, multi‐year budgeting system in 2010. This paper reveals several challenges that threaten the success of this initiative. First, we find that the proposed budget system confuses organizations and programs. Second, there does not appear to be a centrally coordinated effort to implement program budgeting, leading to significant disparities in comprehension, organization, and implementation amongst the subordinate commands in MoD. Finally, there is a distinct lack of communication within the MoD regarding the necessity of a program budget and how the process should move forward. These issues inhibit the implementation of program budgeting in the MoD and diminish the possible gains associated with the multi‐year, programmatic allocation of defense resources.     

Judicious Incentives: International Public Policy Responses to the Globalization of Environmental Management

Public policymakers and regulators worldwide are grappling with the desire to improve environmental quality through appropriate regulation of business, while also streamlining government. Concurrently, environmentally conscience consumers are calling for improved environmental performance by industry. As a result of these pressures, regulators and lawmakers worldwide are attempting to craft effective policies that create adequate incentives for environmental protection on the part of firms, in the face of decreasing budgets and an increased demand for the use of market‐based incentives. To aid decision makers as they struggle with these concerns, this study provides a detailed case examination of the dilemmas and responses of national‐level regulators as they try to develop appropriate responses to the rise of international and “voluntary” management regimes. To accomplish these goals, this article compares the public policy responses of governments around the world to one such voluntary international environmental regime: ISO 14001. ISO 14001 is a form of industry self‐regulation in response to market forces calling for harmonization in environmental management and as a result of consumer and trade‐partner demands. This study examines the relationships between regulators and the regulated in order to understand if ISO 14001 certified firms are receiving regulatory relief or other forms of public policy/regulatory benefits as a result of their certification. It will also examine the impact that government incentives (or their absence) are having on the certification decisions of firms around the world. This information helps us to begin to understand how the trends toward smaller government and voluntary environmental regimes are affecting one another.     

Business interests in salmon aquaculture certification: Competition or collective action?

Research recognizes that strategic business interests can provide an important driver of private regulation, even in the absence of significant societal pressure and non‐governmental organization‐constructed demand. This article examines a range of competition and collective action‐related interests that can motivate firms to promote and adopt certification schemes. We pay particular attention to the hitherto underexplored collective action interest to safeguard common‐pool resources, upon which an industry may depend to sustain yields. Based on a case study of salmon aquaculture certification, the article argues that while the corporate motives repertoire includes strengthening competitiveness and industry reputation, safeguarding shared waters for culturing salmon is key to explaining industry commitment to and adoption of private regulation in this sector.     

Public affairs,issues management,and political strategy: opportunities,opportunities, and more opportunities

This paper begins where Professor Windsor left off and enumerates some other areas in which academic research could be profitably pursued for both intellectual and practical gain. The tone of Professor Windsor's paper is pessimistic, and lays out in detail some of the obstacles to research; but these are not insurmountable. Some key areas that can be explored to the benefit of researchers and practitioners are in self‐regulation, the initiative process, term limits (a relatively recent phenomenon and not particularly well known outside of the USA), and in alliance building, constituency statutes, and links to stakeholder theory and action. Each of these additional areas is addressed in this presentation. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Multi‐Stakeholder Initiatives for Sustainable Development Goals: The Importance of Interlocutors

This article argues that the complex multi‐stakeholder arrangements anticipated for implementing Sustainable Development Goals call for a distinct type of host: an interlocutor. This central idea arises from new comparative research on multi‐stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) undertaken in four countries: Costa Rica, Indonesia, Kenya and Kyrgyzstan. This work adds a detailed dimension to meta‐studies on conditions for success and practical guides for establishing and running MSIs. It begins to fill a significant gap in knowledge by analysing the attributes and competencies required for effectively orchestrating MSIs as well as illuminating their relative significance over time. The context is an anticipated expansion in demand for finely tuned and skilled hosting of Sustainable Development Goals‐inspired MSIs. This task will probably be more complicated than MSIs associated with climate change and Millennium Development Goals, both of which saw business on the side lines with uneven attention paid to the principle of local ownership. Recognising and investing in interlocution as a pivotal role can increase the performance of internationally inspired MSIs which, to date, have a mixed but generally poor record of effectiveness. © 2017 The Authors Public Administration and Development Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Politics of private regulation: ISEAL and the shaping of transnational sustainability governance

Scholars describe the proliferation of sustainability standards by multi‐stakeholder initiatives as part of an organizational field for sustainability. The aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of the institutionalization process of this global organizational field by focusing on the case of the ISEAL Alliance (the global association for sustainability standards). We show how ISEAL puts specific strategies into place to both reinforce and expand the role and influence of sustainability standards. This institutional entrepreneurship consists primarily of two dimensions: institutionalizing macro‐standards based on a market‐driven and procedural vision of sustainability; and simultaneously legitimating both the tools and ISEAL through internal and external enrolments and entanglements. The characterization of ISEAL's activities in this way brings politics back into the analysis of sustainability standard‐related technical debates and extends our understanding of how the micro‐dynamics within organizational fields are interdependent upon macro‐dynamics outside organizational fields.     

Lake Taupo: a multi‐sector collaborative partnership towards sustainable development

This paper explores the motivations for and processes of a unique multi‐stakeholder collaboration aimed at the long‐term sustainable development of a region. The region is that of Australasia's largest lake, Lake Taupo, New Zealand. Lake Taupo has geographic features that have not only enabled the development of a strong economy based on tourism, forestry and agriculture but have also generated particular environmental problems. The findings of the case study present highly innovative solutions that are premised on collaboration and on a ‘business case’ for sustainability. From extensive interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, the case confirms extant literature that looks at the roles of leadership, stakeholder engagement, and first movers in bringing about change, but it also highlights further findings that include the surprisingly important role of fringe stakeholders, the difficulties presented by uncertain regulation, and the need to innovate in tailoring solutions to fit the peculiarities of a specific problem. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experimentalist interactions: Joining up the transnational timber legality regime

This paper analyzes the interactions between the separate components of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, both public and private. It examines how far, and through what institutional mechanisms, these interactions are producing a joined-up transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. The paper argues that the experimentalist architecture of the EU FLEGT initiative has fostered productive, mutually reinforcing interactions both with public timber legality regulation in other consumer countries and with private certification schemes. But this emerging regime remains highly polyarchic, with broad scope for autonomous initiatives by NGOs and private service providers, along with national governments, international organizations, and multi-donor partnerships. Hence horizontal integration and coordination within it depend on a series of institutional mechanisms, some of which are distinctively experimentalist, while others can also be found in more conventional regimes. These mechanisms include cross-referencing and reciprocal endorsement of rules and standards; recursive learning through information pooling and peer review of implementation experience; public oversight and joint assessment of private certification and legality verification schemes; and the “penalty default” effect of public legality regulation in consumer countries, which have pushed both exporting countries and transnational firms to comply with the norms and procedures of the emerging transnational regime. The paper's findings thus provide robust new evidence for the claim advanced in previous work that a joined-up transnational regime can be assembled piece by piece under polyarchic conditions through coordinated learning from decentralized experimentation, without a hegemonic power to impose common global rules.     

Exploring the actions of Government Affairs Managers during economic and financial crises—an exploratory study in the European Union

This paper is a response to the paucity of theoretical and empirical research into the political actions undertaken by organisations to influence policymakers' responses to economic and financial crises. By using original, primary data gathered from semi‐structured interviews conducted with Brussels‐based Government Affairs Managers of multi‐national enterprises, it reports the results of inductive, exploratory research into corporate political activity during the 2007–2011 financial crisis. Results suggest that not all firms are in favour of increased regulatory intervention during times of economic upheaval. They also imply that, during recessions, firms are more likely to seek long‐term as opposed to short‐term relationships with policymakers, they also have a greater propensity to engage in collective political action than individual political action and they use information strategies more frequently than constituency‐building and financial‐incentive strategies. These results are subsequently used as the basis for a conceptual framework that draws on numerous theoretical traditions to capture the antecedents of firms' political behaviours during economic crises. Given the absence of theoretical and empirical work that actively engages with this issue, the research makes important contributions to the existing literature on corporate political activity. It also has practical implications for corporate political strategists and policymakers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The unloved relationship? Dynamic capabilities and political‐market strategy: a research agenda

• In this developmental article, the authors outline a five‐stage system to classify levels of relationship engagement (LRE) between firms and government actors when developing their political‐market strategies (PMS) as part of a wider stakeholder management programme. In an attempt to develop the research agenda in this increasingly important area, the authors propose a set of hypotheses to drive forward the research agenda. Overall, we argue that firms can develop PMS into a dynamic capability but further research is needed to determine whether or not the capability developed is first or second order (i.e. contributing to other sources of competitive advantage).

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Growing exports by signaling product quality: Trade competition and the cross‐national diffusion of ISO 9000 quality standards

Trade policy is an important topic in global public policy. It is recognized that trade is hampered when buyers have incomplete information about the offered products, a problem accentuated in the international markets by the physical and cultural distances between buyers and sellers. Buyers look for proxies to assess product quality, and exporters that can provide assurance about quality gain a competitive advantage. Our paper focuses on voluntary or private regulatory programs that have emerged as important instruments to correct policy failures. We examine how trade competition motivates firms to signal quality by joining ISO 9000, the most widely adopted voluntary quality certification program in the world. Methodologically, our study is novel because we observe trade competition at the bilateral and the sectoral levels. Structural equivalence, the measure of competition we introduce in this paper, captures competitive threats posed by actors that export similar products to the same overseas markets. We study ISO 9000 adoption levels from 1993 to 2002 for 134 countries, and separately for non‐OECD countries and non‐EU countries. Across a variety of specifications, we find that trade competition drives ISO adoption: The uptake of ISO 9000 is encouraged by ISO 9000 adoption by firms located in countries that are “structurally equivalent” trade competitors. Given that information problems about product quality are likely to be more salient for developing country exporters, we find that trade competition offers a stronger motivation for ISO 9000 adoption in non‐OECD countries in relation to developed countries. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Experimentalism in transnational forest governance: Implementing European Union Forest Law Enforcement,Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreements in Indonesia and Ghana

Over the past decade, the European Union (EU) has created a novel experimentalist architecture for transnational forest governance: the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative. This innovative architecture comprises extensive participation by civil society stakeholders in establishing and revising open‐ended framework goals (Voluntary Partnership Agreements [VPAs] with developing countries aimed at promoting sustainable forest governance and preventing illegal logging) and metrics for assessing progress toward them (legality standards and indicators) through monitoring and review of local implementation, underpinned by a penalty default mechanism to sanction non‐cooperation (the EU Timber Regulation that prohibits operators from placing illegally harvested wood on the European market). This paper analyzes the implementation of VPAs in Indonesia and Ghana, the two countries furthest advanced toward issuing FLEGT export licences. A central finding is the reciprocal relationship between the experimentalist architecture of the FLEGT initiative and transnational civil society activism, whereby the VPAs’ insistence on stakeholder participation, independent monitoring, and joint implementation review, underwritten by the EU, empowers domestic non‐governmental organizations with local knowledge to expose problems on the ground, hold public authorities accountable for addressing them, and contribute to developing provisional solutions.     

Linking democratic anchorage and regulatory authority: The case of internet regulators

Scholars and practitioners have repeatedly questioned the democraticness and the authority of transnational multi‐stakeholder organizations, especially those that regulate the internet. To contribute to this discussion, we studied the “democratic anchorages” and the regulatory authority of 23 internet regulators. In particular, we conducted a fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis assessing whether and which anchorages correspond to necessary and/or sufficient conditions for exerting regulatory authority. Our results show that strong anchorage in democratic procedures is specifically relevant for this outcome. Further, we find that weak anchorage in democratically elected politicians leads to high regulatory authority, confirming the significance of non‐state actors in this policy field. More generally, our findings support but also qualify expectations about the compatibility and mutual reinforcement of democratic quality and regulatory authority at the transnational level.     

Money Talks: The Environmental Impact of China's Green Credit Policy

This study examines the impact of China's green credit policy on the environment. In particular, we consider an initiative that requires all banks to base their loan decisions on corporate environmental performance. This is an important issue since it is globally gaining popularity to leverage bank loans as an avenue to enforce corporate environmental responsibility. Moreover, there are only a handful of empirical investigations in relation to the impacts of credit constraint on corporate environmental behaviors and strategies. This research also provides useful insights on how to enhance environmental regulation enforcement, using the Environmental Protection Bureau in partnership with local banks to exert a creditable threat of financial constraint on unfavorable environmental outcomes. Using the synthetic control method and difference‐in‐differences analysis, we find that this policy has significantly motivated firms, particularly those firms with a higher dependence on external financing, to reduce water pollution. We further discover that the policy compels firms to favor pollution prevention at the source instead of end‐of‐pipe treatments, since the policy imposes a long‐term credit constraint on pollution.     

The long‐term development of organised business and its implications for corporatism: A cross‐national comparison of membership,activities and governing capacities of business interest associations, 1980–2003

Internationalisation of markets and the demise of Keynesianism have made business more independent of associational action. Membership density and ‘corporatist’ involvement in wage bargaining and public policy have declined only modestly, while the capacity to govern members has dwindled significantly. This development is driven by the way in which large firms and the state relate to business associations. Large firms still have a vital interest not only in associational action, but also in integrating their smaller counterparts. Stated‐based support for multi‐employer bargaining, as established in most countries, buttresses business associations. By equipping the associations with an encompassing grip on the labour market, this support prompts governments to involve them in public policy. Since encompassing labour market regulation enables the associations to impose negative externalities on unaffiliated businesses, it provides them with a strong selective incentive for membership. The significant decline of the associations' governing capacity emanates from pressures of their large members to reduce costs of association. The implications of this development for interest intermediation are twofold. Given the strong decay of union power, the resilience of corporatism strongly hinges on the continued strength of organised business and on its state‐sponsored engagement in bargaining. At the same time, leeway for compromising has been restrained by the significant decline in the governing capacity of organised business. This decline echoes an ever‐growing predominance of large firms in business associations, while economic internationalisation exacerbates interest conflicts between larger and smaller firms. To the extent that this configuration of interest and power weakens the ability of business associations to integrate the mass of small firms, it develops into the new Achilles heel of corporatism.     

Direct certification in the national school lunch program expands access for children

Under the policy of direct certification for free school meals, school districts use information shared by state agencies about household eligibility for means‐tested programs in the state in order to determine the potential eligibility for free meals of students enrolled in the district. This information allows districts to automatically approve students in these eligible households for free meals without requiring the household to complete the application process. This paper examines the impacts of direct certification on students' likelihood of becoming certified for free meals, using data from a national survey of school food service directors as well as statelevel administrative data on program participation. A state‐level fixed effects model is estimated to account for the possibility of selection bias. The key finding is that direct certification leads to a statistically significant increase in the number of children getting free school meals. More generally, this finding highlights a promising approach for improving access to means‐tested programs without compromising program integrity. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The effects of NBPTS‐certified teachers on student achievement

In this study, we consider the efficacy of a relatively new and widely accepted certification system for teachers established by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). We utilize an extensive database covering the universe of teachers and students in Florida for a four‐year span to determine the relationship between NBPTS certification and the impact of teachers on student test scores from both low‐stakes and high‐stakes exams. Contrary to some previous studies, we find evidence that NBPTS certification provides a positive signal of a teacher's contribution to student achievement only in a few isolated cases. However, our results do reinforce evidence from previous research that the process of becoming NBPTS certified does not increase teacher productivity. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.